"Weeeell, OK then," he says, rubbing his hands together in
satirical glee before refocusing on the outrageous bill.

"But still: 10 bucks for a bagel. I could live with that kind of
guilt for years!"

The New York actor is here in Los Angeles to talk about
Sideways, a movie whose critical reception has transformed
him from contented character actor into a star. He's finding it a
strange and only partly welcome phenomenon.

He may have to learn to like it. Sideways, directed by
About Schmidt's Alexander Payne, is the critical favourite
of the pre-Oscar season, winning Golden Globes for best picture and
screenplay.

Based on a novel by Rex Pickett, the film is about two old
college buddies in their 40s who take a week-long trip to the wine
country inland from Santa Barbara before one of them gets married.
Giamatti plays Miles, a tightly wound school teacher and wine
enthusiast waiting to hear if his third novel will be the one that
gets published.

Thomas Haden Church plays his horndog pal Jack. Miles is
interested in wine, but Jack is interested in sex - and to hell
with his impending nuptials. He's determined that Miles is also
"gonna get [his] joint smooched if it f---in' kills me".

Together the oddly well-matched pair cut a drunken, squabbling
swathe through the snooty vineyards. Jack chases wantonly after
single mother Stephanie, played by Sandra Oh (Payne's wife).
Meanwhile, Miles nurses a fondness for a soulful student and
waitress called Maya (Virginia Madsen) despite his grief over his
recently collapsed marriage.

Some of the movie's lines have already entered the popular
imagination. Giamatti is heartily sick of people approaching him in
the street and screaming, as Miles does at one point, "I am NOT
drinkin' any f---in' MERLOT!"

Giamatti has managed to avoid the worst of the insanity
surrounding Sideways. But it's evident that his career is
different now.

"All of a sudden it's more intense on the press line and it kind
of bums me out," Giamatti says. "It definitely seems like there's
more crazy - crazier - people coming up to me and saying, 'My
friend made a tape of his fish singing and, dude, you gotta listen
to it.' Crazy f---er last night gave me his chatline number: 'You
gotta call me, man!'

"Some woman came up to me after the Critics' Choice awards and
gave me cookies, talking all this crazy shit about birds and
flowers, and it was creepy. And me, I like crazy people, but I like
being able to study them from a distance."

Does he have any interest in or knowledge of wine? After all,
some of the movie's funniest moments centre around Miles sticking
his hooter in wine glasses and detecting bouquets of, for instance,
"Mmm, strawberries, a hint of asparagus ... and a little odour of,
aaahhh, Edam cheese." Giamatti chuckles.

"I don't have any knowledge of wine whatsoever," he says. "Faked
it all. Every last bit of it. And, frankly, it couldn't interest me
less.

I think it's just really kinda queer. I just think it's really
f---in' goofy. I didn't want to make fun of it because it's
ridiculous enough without making fun of it. When I read the script,
I thought, 'This is great, but who the f--- cares about wine?' It
worked way better than I expected it to do."

Among the endearing elements of Sideways is the inspired
casting of Church and Madsen.

"This was the perfect thing for Tom," Giamatti says. "He's a
really eccentric guy. He was doing more ad-libbing and improv than
me."

Suddenly Giamatti drops his voice to a stage whisper: "Hey, man
... is that Larry Flynt sitting over there?" At the next table,
surrounded by his wife and a couple of his executives, is my old
boss, the wheelchair-bound frog prince of porn. I tell Giamatti I
used to write the dirty-letters page for Flynt's flagship rag,
Hustler.

His eyes widen and we have a brief and unprintable digression on
pornography.

A cowgirl with a ... bovine inseminator? That's f---in'
brilliant - and dis-gust-ing!

Giamatti's films include Saving Private Ryan, Mighty
Aphrodite, Big Fat Liar and Paycheck. He says his
proudest moment so far is American Splendor.

Giamatti says the acclaim from Sideways is great, but
then he backtracks a little.

"It's a little freaky, actually. You start to really lose
perspective on the movie when the critical response is as weirdly,
regressively unanimous as it is. I'm such a natural sceptic that I
start thinking, 'Maybe it actually sucks.'"